16th January 2025
Trust continues to rise across banking sectors, though high interest rates mean different sectors have taken different courses. Among current account providers, good customer service seems to be crucial to being trusted.
Every six months, Fairer Finance polls 10,000 banking customers and asks them:
'Based on everything you know about this provider, to what extent would you agree or disagree with the following statement - "I trust [name of their provider]"'
We take the responses to this question and convert them into a trust score,1 which we use to track trust in banking providers through our Trust in Banking Index.
Our trust score subtracts negative responses from positive ones and double-weights the most positive and most negative options. We do this so that we have a single number to measure trust, and to give due weight to strong opinions.
The latest data, from polling completed in September 2024, shows:
Overall trust levels are up slightly since Spring 2024
Savings providers continue to improve their levels of trust, likely because of higher interest rates
Trust in mortgage, loan and credit card providers remains lower than for savings and current accounts. Again, high interest rates may be responsible
Last year, I noted that there were substantial variations between current account providers in trust scores.
As the chart below shows, this trend has continued. A handful of providers have higher-than-average trust scores: Starling, First Direct, Nationwide and Monzo.
The big high street banks, meanwhile, have kept fairly close together - and close to, or slightly below, the sector average.
The banks that have higher trust scores have a range of strengths in our polling:
Starling and Monzo poll very well on the quality of their apps
Nationwide scores best on branch access and in-branch customer service
First Direct scores best for customer service, including customer service over the phone
One factor that is correlated with trust across the board is the quality of providers’ customer service.
Banks that have a large proportion of customers who are ‘extremely satisfied’ with their customer service also tend to have a large percentage of customers who ‘strongly agree’ that they trust them.
This suggests that good customer service helps to build trust.
This result makes sense intuitively.
If a customer has a good interaction with a customer service agent, it will likely build their trust in their bank because it shows that the bank is responsive and effective.
On the other hand, if a customer has a bad interaction with a customer service agent - or can’t access customer service support when they need it - their trust will be damaged.
Our data suggests that there are multiple ways for banks to build trust: having good apps and having wide access to branches have worked for different providers.
Having good customer service, though, seems to be a crucial ingredient.
1 The question has the following options: "strongly agree", "agree", "neither agree nor disagree", "disagree" and "strongly disagree". The trust index score is calculated using the following formula: ((% answering strongly agree x 2) + (% answering agree) + (% answering disagree x -1) + (% answering strongly disagree x -2))/ 2. We use this formula to subtract those who distrust a provider from those who trust them, to give additional weight to those answering strongly agree and strongly disagree, and to create a single score to compare sectors and track change over time.